Star Wars - Redemption ( FanMade Project )
Note : Project's updates won't always be at the top of it, so when an update come, scroll to explore what's new !
"Star Wars - Redemption" is the temporary title I've found for a fan made project inspired mostly by the clone wars TV series and, of course, Star Wars universe. At the beginning it was just about a Jedi in a clone outfit and the more I spend time on it, the more new stuff is added to this base concept. I'll add all things about it here, it's the project's main page. But you may see individual assets on separated projects if you want 
As it's a fan project I don't spend the time I'd want on it, the evolution will be chaotic in terms of regularity ^^ Sorry in advance !
The project may take place between Ep2 & Ep5 or more, I'm not done yet with the story.
I work on it with Thomas Chaumel who is the animator behind most of the moving characters & objects in Redemption (I do animation as well but…let's say I'm at a smaller level of XP ^^")
Des Bisous ! ♥
Note : you can follow the project's evolution on artstation : https://www.artstation.com/artwork/gO4Pm
And of course, constructive criticism is always appreciated
Disclaimer : https://www.artstation.com/vexod14/blog/GYLq/star-wars-redemption-disclaimer
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Love it dude
About a movie it can seems strange but I wanted to do a short film at the very beginning ^^
But to be honest, now things are far more exciting on a real time engine. Things moves smooth, render is beautiful even if it's in real time and you can play with your editor assets like you would play with Lego stuff, I find it personally much more fun this way
Hi everyone !
Things are moving forward on our project, I've added a new map called "Lumberia" which is the natal planet of Mevenn, the heroin of the game. Lumberia is under construction as Geonosis and Space map, it's very WIP but at the moment it's my favorite environment, things here are flourish, vivid, and full of colors ! This map was born months ago just as an idea of making an environment with vegetation, a green touch and a needed breath into the project which had only rocks, sand and sci-fi props everywhere. I wanted to make a mix between nature and these assets, and I also wanted to better the Mevenn's story, so here came Lumberia...I may add conceptarts later, I need to finish them and there's a lot to tell about this new place
First try with the first trees/grass shaders I made for Lumberia, cool but a bit noisy and damn laggy =/
( Here are few assets I made for Lumberia )
But if trees are cool, flowers adds a nicer touch to the landscape, so I tried to do some, and reworked how the grass worked ( from model to shader )
Yeaaah, almost that ! Now I just need to create a real landscape heightmap. For this task, I reused the Lumberia cliff's heightmap mixed with some variators (a "variator" is a custom noise I made by hand, well it's just a cool grayscale texture ^^"), it was done on substance designer, which has a really nice potential for this I think (with a bit more practice I could do some cool base for my levels). Once this map is imported into unreal I can quickly draw my foliage, it's WIP, but it's really pleasant to play in this animated and peaceful forest...;)
And of course now all things are optimized so you can really make huge plains of grass or ultra-dense forests
I've also added Tesselation on the landscape materials, a feature that really adds to the environment surfaces variation feeling when you walk, for example, on Geonosis's Sand or near Lumberia's RockClifs
Another cool thing is about the skymap, which was a bit ugly when you looked at it under sunscattered fog. I used Normalmap compression setting and used channels Red and Green to define sky/coulds colors and add some movement near the sun area and all "lighted" clouds, so now skies live and their textures looks good
I've aslo reduced the polycount of Mevenn's face which was ridiculously too high compared to the other character's parts
And also I've added more possibilities on her face rig, so now Thomas Chaumel can add creepy feel on her teeth by pushing out Mevenn's canines (and updated a little the joints hierarchy, added controllers and more joints for the tongue)
I've added some new facial expressions, but didn't have played on an expression yet which use these new controllers
-> Venator Wall 01
Although the art style isn't really my cup of tea but all the same I have to acknowledge your dedication plus that of others have for this fan derived project and it would be unsurprising to think IP connected eyeballs may've popped in for a peek since the work is obviously aesthetically polished. Anyway hope you make it too a playable demo.
Cheers.
WIP idle, skin/Rig/Anim made 100% on Akeytsu
Some news from Star Wars - Redemption, I know I know, it's been 3 months...and I apologize for that. I had to do some art tests and was a bit stressed about it. So there's some news, not that much, but I hope you'll keep loving this project, cause yeah, I received a lot of great feedback and encouragement from many of you, which warmed our hearts to us three. I want to join with Fantin and Thomas to say : thank you all for your awesome support, it allows us to keep moving forward ! ♥
SO...what's up ?
I Improved Lumberia with a reworked grass tilemap ( the grass under the grass ), vegetation's shader ( blend with ground surfaces using pixel depth offset instead of using translucent shader - Big thanks to Anthony Daneluzzi for showing me this cool tricks ! ), foliage is now fine tuned to allow painting a huge forest in no time, added VFX emitter that spawn somme flower's petal, little "force glows" in order to get a better mood, tweaked lighting a bit and finally I started to work on sith's temple assets using a method I guess is close to overwatch's one for faking sculpted edges with decals.
So here is a little screenshot of this trick, look at the wall's separation, in its middle :
In fact, there's only two "boxes", meaning there's no bevel, only a decalmesh with a sculpt trim normal, it only blends with mesh normals which are set to hard edges each time the relief changes, good things with this technique is the amount of time saved on sculpting assets over and over again, no more tedious Uvwrapp, keep model simple, and go back to modeling with smoothgroops ( which is really important to me =P )
So first thing I needed to do was a tileable texture, using my dear 3DCoat it was fairly easy to do so : ( 0% ZBrush or maya or max or Designer here guys
Then, I worked on a new kind of material that could allow me to paint different surface materials depending on separate vertexcolor channels, here is a first test with a single plane, 4 vertices with one blue, one red, one green, and one with no Red/Green or Blue, in other words : black
I also blend depending on each layered material's heightmap
Here is what I've been up to do with all maps blended ( BaseColor, Composite 1 (Metal/Rough/AO), Composite 2 (Cavity/Emissive/Height), and Normalmap ) :
Lumberia's Forest as it's now in the game
Improved all scene's colorimetry with postprocess which desaturate scene based on ZDpeth pass. Useful for Space maps where there's no "horizon" unlike ground maps
The rig is now really good, I guess it's not 100% perfect but we may call it finished ^^ I updated it with a "Fly" controller for better in-air moves, that was a request from Thomas Chaumel ( our Animator on Redemtpion ) who works now at TeamTo Valence, on several Animated TV series with strong rigs made on Maya, so he told me some suggestion I could implement in Mevenn's rig for bettering his animation workflow. The Fly controller is just a joint between the root and the pelvis which allow the animator to define a new mass center of the mesh, it's really important when you make spins and stunts, and you can offset it on each keyframe as you wish
Facial part has now more expressions stored in Akeytsu, facial rig is 100% ok to Thomas and I so we can make Mevenn live !
Training room WIPs, which is a rework of an old environment I did back in 2013, but optimized this time with better detail's management ( the old one had too many greeble/random stuff on areas we don't want to stick on. It's fixed now
Old version ( 3dsmax+Vray, composited on photoshop, not in realtime =/ )
From this old mesh, I remapped UVs by hand on this texture sheet, made for another environment ( Mevenn's Room, in the works
). The goald was to define clearly colors, and what's metallic or not. I also performed a vertice normals faceweight script so the model looked "highpoly", but in fact it wasn't.
WIP of the new mapped one, realtime on UE4 :
I also Improved shaders functions with a vertex color parametrable emissive, see how "light" on neons decrease progressively when going on top of the room, I think it's a good addition to help level design being easier to read
From there, I simplified all models and baked all PBR maps into Marmoset 3.05 on these new really low-poly assets. After this I simply imported the result into 3DCoat on my lowpoly models and refined all these textures, and as I already had informations about metal/Rough/Colors, all I needed to do was to pick there and paint precisely there, it took me a few minutes to do, here is the new map used ingame :
As model's Vertices normals were carefully oriented to arbitrary planar positions, I can also reuse this atlas on another asset
...Once finished with all textures baked and enhanced on new optimized meshes :
Last but not least, the Grass tiles I talked about at the very beginning :
A variant with Clover cover ^^ I use it a lot on trunks/Rocks to generate a kind of lichen/moss, it works really well
Yet some screenshots about others environment to end this new post
There's some dying Lucrehulk's control spheres in the sky =D A little VFX I made, it's looks really good except the beam which should come from clone army, at the moment it comes from the emitter's world position =/ It looked like a kind of a reactor trail, not a destruction beam, so I removed it for screenshots ^^" You can still see it on the blend vertex wall I posted above
The little red guys should be an spawnable opponent
Some Bacta heal Kegs on blue areas, I know that level design is ultra basic atm, cause we still work on gameplay/feel, once the character will move as expected we will start having real fun making levels
And then the rest of Venator's interior, it's not "really" the one that may exist, I just take some references, moods, from films, TV serie and other custom projects to build my own version of this interior
That's all folks !
Des Bisous ! And MERCI BEAUCOUP again guys for your super support ♥
New guy added !
An Elite's skin for harder-to-kill ones :
Also you're foliage and ground cover are beautiful, I'd love to see more details about your process for those.
I've also made a first try for a waterfall
I've created some water effects for Lumberia, I want to add some other features such as underwater sun scattering but don't know how to proceed yet, except by placing manually some meshes with a fake effect, I'm not a huge fan of it as it's not something managed dynamically. But of course if the final level is a small one it would be a good choice
This is our environment material. Almost finished (need to rework the variator's part, simplify some areas to be able to use this material over more stuff than walls and pillars, it's probably the most difficult part to achieve for me as I feel I'm new to game development tricks, especially about environment art). This one took me a lot of time and iterations as I wanted to have a specific result and didn't knew all the required tricks involved to make it, but things begin to look nicer and nicer and I'm pretty happy with the result I get at each iteration
Now we can simply blend two surfaces (here a sculpted Sith wall and bricks), add noise "Variators", animated or not, which I'm using intensively when I'm texturing all my assets on 3DCoat, add or not a "SnowSandMoss" layer over the whole mesh depending on Z+ projection, add a distinct color to each of these surfaces...each of the features are controlled by at least vertex color + most of the time a custom mask texture...and plenty of other cool controls =D The goal is to simplify a lot environment asset's creation while keeping an artistic control on top of it
I've made some new tiling maps for the upcoming assets (it's still WIP and may change later) :
I decided then to try out reworking some of The Venator's corridors using this new workflow based more on a good UV unwrapping (meaning a precise one where each vertex coordinate is wisely used and not just randomly packed) :
using mostly these two textures + a decal/trim for all local details and break the texture tiling :
(the following is an old one I did last year)
About Leveldesign, which is currently just not done (each "level" I did was only to test the assets, and how I could build things with them
So...I decided to make a fairly simple shader that shows distances in our upcoming levels and will soon be used for starting level design, at last =P
And now we have a new Mevenn (new face, new Phoenix skin) integrated into unreal as our playable character ! New anims are rough for now but all moves are intended to be faster than what we had before, not meaning they'll be simpler
A first glimpse at the game now we've added more and more stuff, it's still really WIP on anim/gameplay level but it's also a strong base for all that we want to build up next
There are some issues with popping objects in this level which may come from the huge forest being made in this map ^^"
That's all folks ! And really sorry again for the lack of stuff this time (probably will be the same next time, but as stated in the project's page on artstation, Redemption's development "work-pace" is meant to be chaotic/irregular, but, well...it's just a fan project
We also have another animator joining the project, Steven Menager (find him here on vimeo : https://vimeo.com/user41159324)
Also, I'm streaming from time to time about the project only, it a kind of a "live making of" :
Have a good day all !
Whole new animset done on Droideka, here are some of these :
Retract
Roll
Deploy
Turn Right
Stun Attack
Our main character (Mevenn) had some upgrades ^^ Here is a first try on a new weapon, we wanted to have something cooler and we're damn fans of Darth Maul...soooooooooo(cisse) :
As well as her face :
(this "new" face wasn't exactly what I wanted on some parts, especially about her chin area (if you know the Bogdanov brothers...). So I had to fix it, but the main fix was to adjust her nose, remove lower eyelashes, adjust her texture work on her face (more stylized and assumed details), adapt her warpaints to a more "magical/nature-connected" look as she was born on a forest planet (Lumberia
I've also increased the texture quality we had in Akeytsu :
(that's her final face btw
Some cutted geometry on haircuts, so now materials are simpler in UE4, no more transparency, better perfs
I also tried some R&D to allow twist & roll joints, obviously not fully reverse-controlled automatically as Akeytsu doesn't provide such constrains yet, but it worked pretty well and you could create exactly your bends/arcs as you want, plus it's appart from your IK chain, meaning you could use squash'n strech with a red IK ON ^^
Here is the hierarchy, twist/roll joints are offset from their IK parent joints so you can figure out who controls who :
The only hassle we encountered then was about selecting our base IK joints ; as they were no longer weighted to any vertices we were forced to search them in the picker list, or reorganize them under your IK handles so you could "quickly" access them using up arrow key...just a pain tbh ^^"
I fixed this cool idea by simply avoiding the middle joint (or the first twist) of each chain and using only one MidArm/MidUpperArm joint, and swkinned half of each arm's part to each joints. But there's one little trick which allows for a quick & good control : while you will find logic to skin your "wrist-to-MidLowerArm vertices" to your "LowerArm-RollJoint" and vertices from this middle to the elbow to your LowerArm joint, the upperarm works differently. Skin vertices "near elbow" to your Arm joint (instead of the Arm-Roll
This improved hierarchy looks like this :
As I reworked the leg & arm rig, I also wanted to improve the facial one. There was some issues on animating the previous iteration, especially on Mevenn's jaw cause I decided to parent every mouth joints to a single mouth controller, which was cool and stupid at the same time ^^" So once improved, I can achieve all these movements with a few clics :
More details about this facial rig :
And here are some beauty shots done in a dedicated level in UE4 (really done just for rendering purpose, nothing else
And last but not least : I wanted to make an homage to the guys who made this project possible ♥
It is also important to notice that the project "StarWars-Redemption" is obviously not affiliated with Nukeygara in any way, there was just an awesome team making an awesome software at the same time I wanted to simply pose some of my characters, then I animated them, created some environments on unreal, called for friends to help me on dev and on animation and that's it
Akeytsu even brought back Thomas Chaumel the taste of animation (animator on the project and one of my best/oldest friend). It also gave him the will to work definitely in the industry. Now he is a reliable member of TeamTo Valence (FR) and enjoys his new life as an animator. His ID "Akeyblack" on discord is someway an Easter-egg to this beautiful story
So, many thanks to Aurélien Charrier, Cédric Vidal-Duvernet, Yannick Rousseau, Charles Sultan, Robin Ciron, Thomas Robin, Charles-Arthur Bourget, Annabel Grindatto, and every others who worked on this wonderful software ♥ You truly are the Best !
+ a quick tutorial I did on Akeytsu/3DCoat to get 100% accurate skinning over tons of overlaped assets :
About Mevenn, i jsut think her default idle anim with the lightsaber out should insist on the fact she control them at distance, sometimes feels like a animation bug, really contrasts with the combat animations that are trully amazing!
You're right, and I want to rework this idle also to have appealing facial expressions (that's why I've let her helmet in main menu ^^"). Maybe adding some hilt-throw, force tricks with sabers could help more selling it. I need to try more stuff
I've been heavily focusing on it last weeks (curious thing as I've also a (super-cool) job during the day, I should rest more, but instead of it I work like a machine ^^").
So here is a summary :
- Now we have a build. Yeah. Game is finally standalone, playable on a (good enough) windows PC. That's something we should've had a long time ago but anyway, now it's there. And it's cool
- Since our only game designer left the project months ago we've faced a problem : we had to do blueprint. And as an artist, it's always a pain to dig into this for many reasons. But hey ! Look at the cool part of the solution : you're going to learn it ! And it becomes more and more fun to use finally
So now, I also take care of blueprints
- I've started working on Lumberia last year, because I had enough of desert environments of both Geonosis and Space corridors, and I've started to create modular environment assets to build a dungeon. You've seen some of these on the past updates when I was trying to create my master env. shader, now everything works I can show a bit more of it. Every environment benefits of it, and it speeds up a lot the way I worked them. But I'm not 100% satisfied with what I get, since I think it involves still too much repetitive task and could be more optimized. Next project should start from it and improve it.
- I've also decided to stop developing the project, not due to any strike (don't worry), but simply because I've figured out that I've mostly developed it alone, and I can't keep doing this. It's above my will now, I need to do something else than working again when I'm "off-work", and focus and shorter project. That's why, in next December's end, Redemption's updates will heavily decrease and hopefully reach 0 faster than light. I think this project could've been far far away than what we have now, and of course I'll be forever sad about it, but time has come to leave it behind and explore new horizons. Next project won't be about Star Wars by the way.
That said, there's still one big month to add more stuff =P
So let's go for the screenshots and enjoy
Des Bisous ♥
I don't mind sharing it over the web since I do not want to receive a strike letter.
Next project won't be that huge I think : I'll be alone (for real this time), I aim making character mostly art, rig and animation (partly to promote Akeytsu as much as I can
Let me give you a good -yet curious- example of how I've been too focused on work. I bought a Harp like 3 years ago and I played it less than once per week. While I still love this instrument (it's magical ♥), I didn't find enough time to play it more since I was almost constantly working on Redemption. This has to stop, simply
So, here is what Thomas did mostly using akeytsu (for character animation part) and maya (for the camera movement), then I used Marmoset Toolbag 3.03 to render this out and AfterFX to adjust a few things
artstation post : https://www.artstation.com/artwork/w64ZaY
Using subsurface on this big destroyers helped me adding some fake bevels on all hard edges of the mesh
I just saw I forgot to post Lumberia mountains, handpainted stuff on 3DCoat as usual
(Base color only here, I use normalmaps and a simplified PBR setup for in-game assets)
I'll post more shots in the upcoming weeks but we're still creating new ones, just the two of us, so that's why it can take some time between two shots
Then, I'm not sure to see what you means with "Astartes", I've searched a bit and found something cool about warhammer 40K (despite I don't know much about this universe I guess that's what you meant).
For now we focus on making a trailer because that's something we can handle from start to finish (today more than ever the game needs more programming efforts), so we're only two guys crafting this and I don't know how long we will keep the strenght to thrive on this quite "new" project, yet it's a really amazing experience and we take a lot of pleasure making it